


i hear my heart breaking tonight. (do you hear it too?)

by laddybants



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (implied hallucinations in any case), Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Gen, Hallucinations, IT'S JONATHANS DEATH like it's what you expect im sorry!!!, Sort Of, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Suicide, i can't judge the severity of things for the life of me, like.. canon typical but also perhaps a bit more?, oh my god how to tag this, theres omc too but only as a plot device dw abt him, voyeurism but in a not sexual way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25384864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laddybants/pseuds/laddybants
Summary: Account of Arthur Blackmoor, regarding the death of Jonathan Fanshawe. Original account taken direct from subject evening of August 9th, 1832, committed to paper morning of August 10th, 1832.
Relationships: Jonathan Fanshawe & Jonah Magnus
Comments: 14
Kudos: 12





	i hear my heart breaking tonight. (do you hear it too?)

**Author's Note:**

> it's jonathan dying i tried my best to warn you? there's gore. i hate writing gore it turns out, and shoutout to mimi for telling me this couldn't realistically happen because you'd bleed out too soon. (i'm explaining it with entity magic.) i hope she never sees this.
> 
> re: 'statement fic': it's a statement and then 3rd person limited pov w jonathan so technically, yes, it's a statement fic, but also no it's another thing as well? also shoutout if you spot the sort-of martin parallel
> 
> title....may or may not be a joke based on fic content.

_Account of Arthur Blackmoor, regarding the death of Jonathan Fanshawe. Original account taken direct from subject evening of August 9th, 1832, committed to paper morning of August 10th, 1832._

_‘First I must apologise for my behaviour upon arrival. I only meant to convey that this has been a most dreadful and unusual – and ongoing – event, and in doing so I fear I upset your personal assistant, which I can assure you was not my intent. I’ve just been so shaken by the whole thing… but of course, it’s that which I came to talk to you about, a task which I find myself delaying. I have no desire to relive it, of course, but this seemed like the place where I would find an answer of some sort._

_He spoke of you often, even after the severance of communication between you two. Until late last year, he regarded you very highly indeed, even despite the… unconventional nature of your investigations. I cannot say I have so far found much of this as impressive as he, though I will admit my opinion is coloured by his own in those last few months._

_They were difficult, to say the least. Many times during a surgery he would stop and have the queerest of looks upon his face, as if witness to unfathomable terror. At the time myself and our assistants explained it as a lingering effect of finding Mr. von Closen dead, due to him being such a good friend of Jonathan’s. The autopsy, as well, we assumed to have been upsetting: it’s one thing to dissect a cadaver belonging to a stranger, and another entirely to cut open the body of a friend. But I digress. The fact remains that he wasn’t entirely himself in those last months, even after deeming himself mentally sound enough to return to work in late January. But even so, he did his job faithfully enough that we weren’t going to hound him over a few momentary lapses._

_Until yesterday. You see, he’d often muttered things to himself – a forgivable malady, but a malady nonetheless – along the lines of not wanting to ‘see it again’ and such. Well, this must have been the final straw, because halfway through a transplant he made the most unholy shriek and leapt back as if burned, fleeing the room. I thought it best to chase after him, as the other doctors present were more than capable of finishing on their own, and his display had been shocking to say the least._

_I wasn’t sure at first which way he’d gone, until I heard noises coming from in his study. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the sound of a man trying to cut himself open, Mr Magnus, but I can assure you it is not pleasant. He’d locked the door, so any attempt on my part to get inside was futile. It sounded as if he wasn’t stopping, as if it was all of him that he wanted to see, not just a singular limb or organ. He didn’t respond to my calls, nor to the increasingly frantic knocking from one of the older surgeons who’d happened to be passing through. In the end, the groans came to a crescendo just as we sent for a chair to break the door down with, and only moments before the door caved in, the screams became something else._

_It sickens me to say, but it sounded as if he was laughing._

_And oh, what a horrible sight greeted us! There lay my friend, in such a deplorable state, far beyond saving. His skin was laid out before him, and all of his internal organs sliced open by the scalpel that he’d been using calmly only minutes before. The worst of it, though, was his face, for I can stomach obscene amounts of body mutilation, but the expression upon it was one of serenity, of_ satisfaction. _One that didn’t reach his eyes, I might add. Oh no, for those – those were held, one in each hand, like some jewel in the grasp of a painted emperor._

_I tell you all this not because I think you can help, but because I desire an explanation. I’m no fool. I know the nature of your studies, as well as I know that a man who is insane cannot cut himself into pieces with such precision and purpose. There was something unnatural far beyond human capabilities at play, I’m sure of it. You were the only person I could think to ask for answers, as much as my friend may have disliked you. You may have none, but I feel… I feel that Jonathan would have wanted me to try regardless. I don’t want him to have died in vain and in obscurity.’_

* * *

Seven months. Seven months Jonathan has held off from slicing himself open to check, as bodies around him explode into nothing but eyes. Every waking moment for seven months has felt like a dream that has its fingers around his throat.

And it’s all Jonah Magnus’ doing.

Jonathan is no idiot. He knows what he’s been seeing. The first time was tame enough after the initial horror of seeing his friend laced with eyes, pouring tears forth from vessels where blood should have flowed. He still sees them in his dreams and wakes pale and shaken, hands clutching at his chest as if to pry his ribs open.

No, the first time after Albrecht was gentle. Jonathan thought it was some sort of internal scarring at first; just a thin line on the surface of the woman’s liver and a slight bump beneath it. He’d wanted to cut around it. He remembers that very thought clearly: _leave it alone, whatever it is. _Instead, he’d found himself reaching down and gently pulling the flesh apart with his fingers as if–__

__–as if opening an eye. It didn’t blink, for how could it? But there it was, embedded in a dead woman’s liver. The other doctors showed no sign of seeing it. They made no reaction at all, and when Jonathan looked up he found them all staring intently at him, with wide, icy eyes. He blinked, and the vision passed, but the eye remained._ _

__Since then they’ve slowly grown in both size and number, to the point where Jonathan once pulled out a fistful of them off a femur like grapes from a vine, feeling them pop inside his fist as his colleagues stared back with Jonah’s eyes._ _

__Are they inside him now, that same watery blue that so shook Victor Frankenstein when his monster first shuddered to life? How many of them cluster inside of him, searching for something hidden by vessels and sinew? He can _feel_ them turning inside of him, straining to See. The eye in the throat was what did it, the one that fixed upon him with such disgust and judgement that Jonathan had screamed for the first time since boyhood, tears falling unimpeded from his own._ _

__What else is there to do, then, than to see for himself what horrors lie underneath his skin? He even has the scalpel in his hand, ready to use on a living, breathing, _seeing_ patient._ _

__He’s not careful as he slices a line down the centre of his torso. It veers off near the bottom and is deeper in some places, but it’s a start. Jonathan’s hands are slick with blood all too soon, and it’s this same blood that smears his stomach as he pulls the skin back to reveal nothing. Nothing! No eyes, no ‘eyelids’, no unevenness to his organs._ _

__“No,” he says, and already it sounds more like gargling than speech and he can taste blood keenly in his mouth. His hands start to shake more violently. _He didn’t do this for nothing. He knows there are eyes.__ _

__His liver is first, slipping out of his hands like a fish and onto the floor, taking intestines with it. They twitch and squirm on the floor as Jonathan tears his liver apart. As it breaks, bile erupts from it, bitter in his mouth and burning in his eyes. No others, though._ _

__Methodically and with purpose, Jonathan bursts his other internal organs. The floor is wet and glistening, dark from blood and rancid from the other fluids. More than once he wants to retch, but he no longer has a stomach to do it with. But Jonathan is stubborn, and always has been. He didn’t contact Jonah ever again despite the other man’s numerous attempts. He didn’t concede when Albrecht insisted all heavenly bodies revolve around the Earth. _He is going to find the eyes inside of him.__ _

__It’s not long before Jonathan realises he may die first. Nowhere he’s looked has contained eyes. Skin hangs from his arms like a loose glove. He snapped his fibulas long ago. Nothing – _nothing_ – has contained an eye. Noises from outside start to filter in; incessant banging and pleads for him to _open the door, please Jonathan.__ _

__Worst of all, he can still feel them. There are eyes inside of him, though he no longer has an inside. They move, they quirm, they See. He is lungs and a head only, and a heart that still beats weakly, through everything. Jonathan starts sobbing but halfway through it turns into a laugh. The voice isn’t his own. It’s higher in pitch and more satisfied than he can ever be again. Even through all this, he’s still tied so very strongly to Jonah._ _

__His own… are they blue now? When did they become blue? When did he stop seeing things as himself and start seeing them as Jonah? Slowly now – because what strength does he have left, really? – he reaches for his face. Jonathan can feel his hands trembling, but he doesn’t trust the image of them, bloody and so very small in comparison to the rest of him. He can hear the door shattering, but doesn’t dare turn to look. Instead, it’s no longer difficult to break his own skin, the thin covering that he thought protected them for all his life tearing like paper. The last thing he feels is the cold weight of them in his hands, and he doesn’t have enough life in him anymore to crush them._ _

**Author's Note:**

> mia upon reading this: years after fanshawes death, the board game "operation" is invented by arth-
> 
> (also there were a lot of water balloon jokes in that conversation. sorry to anyone who's ever burst an organ on purpose i just assume they're all filled with fluids. bile and pepsin and hydrochloric acid and amylase and so on)
> 
> not gonna link my tumblr on this one either folks! ask if you're desperate i guess. gnight all!


End file.
